It's almost Thanksgiving, and you know what that means: stuffing your face to comatosis. That and all the unsavory relatives you managed to keep at bay the rest of the year.

For those of us lucky-enough (unlucky?) in the task of fixing this year's feast, there isn't a lot of time left to settle on a menu. It's always a tough call, what to prepare. So, here's a bright idea: ask a chatbot.

Yes, yes, it's been done before — turning to AI for desperate Thanksgiving assistance. (The New York Times tried ChatGPT recipes in 2022.) The results have generally been middling. But perhaps the prompts were the issue.

Curiosity got the better of me. So I asked some of the more popular chatbots, ChatGPT and Claude, for a Thanksgiving menu "so unique it'd wow positively any family member." That'd do the trick, I reckoned.
 
Let me tell you, reader, the AI didn't disappoint.

ChatGPT suggested a cocktail hour - fancy! - featuring whipped sweet potato and goat cheese crostini. Claude shot for the moon, suggesting an appetizer "butternut squash bisque with sage foam" that certainly checked the unique box.

"Pumpkin soup shooters with cinnamon crème fraîche" sounds appetizing? That's what ChatGPT suggested for the appetizer, followed by a main course of miso-butter turkey with a ginger-soy glaze. Claude, once again the wild card, suggested "lavender and fennel dry-brined turkey with a honey-thyme glaze." The chatbot described it as an herbaceous departure from classic roast turkey. Indeed.

And the sides? ChatGPT suggested chili-lime corn bread and pistachio risotto. Claude wanted the fine liquor pulled out for a "wild mushroom and chestnut stuffing with aged sherry."

Both bots recommend big finishers, like pie and cheesecake and healthy scoops of ice cream. But this is no ordinary ice cream and no ordinary cheesecake-the ice cream's saffron flavored and the cheesecake is chai spiced.

“This menu takes familiar Thanksgiving flavors and elevates them through unexpected ingredients, techniques, and combinations,” Claude writes of its creations. “Each dish tells a story and invites conversation, making the meal not just about food, but about shared experience and creativity.”

I can’t argue with that. But as the designated cook this year … well, let’s just say I’m not going to be aiming for Top Chef.

News
OpenAI’s Sora leaks: A group appears to have leaked access to Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, in protest of what it’s calling “art washing” on OpenAI’s part.

Amazon backs Anthropic, again: Anthropic has raised an additional $4 billion from Amazon and has agreed to train its flagship generative AI models primarily on Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing division.

AI app connectors: In other Anthropic news, the company has proposed a new standard, the Model Context Protocol, for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data resides.

OpenAI funds "AI morality" research: OpenAI is pouring $1 million into a Duke University research program to develop algorithms that can predict humans' moral judgments.

YouTube now supports AI backgrounds: Dream Screen in Shorts, YouTube's short video format, allows users to generate video backdrops using AI.
 Brave brings AI chat: Search engine Brave announced AI chat for follow-up questions of queries based on a primary query on its new web search Brave Search - an extension of Brave's Answer with AI that summarizes web searches based on AI.

Ai2 open sources Tülu 3: The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) has released Tülu 3, a generative AI model that can be fine-tuned and customized for a range of applications (e.g., solving math problems).

Crusoe raises cash: Crusoe Energy, a startup building data centers reportedly to be leased to Oracle, Microsoft, and OpenAI, is in the process of raising $818 million, according to an SEC filing.

Threads tests AI summaries: Meta's Threads has started testing AI-generated summaries of what people are discussing on the platform, taking a page from rival X.

Research paper of the week
DeepMind, Google's AI research org, has developed a new AI system called AlphaQubit it claims can accurately identify errors inside of quantum computers.

Quantum computers are potentially much more powerful than classical machines for certain workloads. But they are also more susceptible to "noise," or general errors.

AlphaQubit identifies these errors so that they can be mitigated and corrected for, helping make quantum computers more reliable.

It's not a flawless system, though. Google acknowledges in a post that AlphaQubit is too slow to correct for errors in real time—and is not especially data-efficient. Work is underway on improved versions, says the company.

Model of the week
Runway, a startup building AI tools for content creators, has released a new image-generation model that the company claims offers better stylistic control than most.

Called Frames, the model is slowly rolling out to users of Runway's Gen-3 Alpha video generator and can reliably create images that stay true to a particular aesthetic, the company says.

It's also important to mention that Runway is maybe playing by very loose copyright rules. In April this year, 404 Media reported the company used YouTube footage without permission from channels such as Disney and popular creator MKBHD in order to train its models.

In a comment to press, Runway refused to tell me the origin of the data Frames has been trained on.

Like many generative AI companies, Runway asserts its data-scraping practices are protected under fair use doctrine. That theory is being tested in a number of courtroom battles, including a class action suit filed against Runway and several of its art-generator rivals.

Grab bag
Nvidia has unveiled a model it's calling "the world's most flexible sound machine."

Dubbed Fugatto, the chip giant's model can create a mix of music, voices, and sounds from a text description and a collection of audio files. For instance, Fugatto can create a music snippet based on a prompt, remove or add instruments from/to a song, and change the accent or emotion in a vocal performance.

Fugatto can also generate things that don't exist in the real world, Nvidia claims, after being trained on millions of openly licensed sounds and songs.

For example, the company said Fugatto can make a trumpet bark or a saxophone meow. "With fine-tuning and small amounts of singing data, researchers found it could handle tasks it was not trained on, like generating a high-quality singing voice from a text prompt," the company wrote in a blog post.

Nvidia hasn't released Fugatto, fearing it might be misused. But according to Reuters, the company is considering how it might launch the model "responsibly" were it to make it available.